


thermodynamics

by krbk



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Sharing a Bed, barely beta'd, being soft, short and sweet, thanks to the GW server for prompting this, this can be read as platonic or romantic i dont care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:41:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23744008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krbk/pseuds/krbk
Summary: The thermostat breaks.Desire for thermodynamic stability and absolutely nothing else is what makes Maka wriggle from her bed, still wrapped in blankets with the faintest line of a malicious grin teasing at the corners of her mouth.
Relationships: Maka Albarn & Soul Eater Evans
Kudos: 25





	thermodynamics

What a lot of people forget about deserts is how  _ fucking _ cold it gets after the sun sinks below the horizon. There’s a brief window after the last few rays of sunlight where the temperature is still moderately tolerable, but now, nearing midnight in an apartment with a broken heating system, Maka finds herself shivering under her blankets. 

She had called the maintenance line printed in small text on the thermostat hours earlier, but had been told by a robotic-sounding man that it would be a day or two before they could send a tech out to fix it. She had sighed- figuring that she could handle a night that was just a bit chillier than she was used to. She wasn’t expecting that their thin-walled apartment would be worse than herself at retaining heat in the cold Nevada night. 

The bedding she sleeps with is meant for comfort, yes, but her comfort does not typically involve keeping herself warm in temperatures below 60 degrees Fahrenheit or so. Usually, the thermostat does its dutifully assigned job and raucously cranks the dusty old radiators on when her room dips just under bearable, but due to aforementioned circumstances, she is, for lack of a better phrase, freezing her ass off. 

Maka feels more or less ridiculous laying under every blanket to her name and still shivering. She sighs. She briefly weighs the pros and cons of getting herself up to make a mug of hot tea or even getting in a hot shower, but both seem like short term, ineffective solutions to a long term, very chilly problem. Her toes feel numb even in her fuzzy cat-printed socks and she frowns. 

She closes her eyes and briefly lets her soul reach out to check on her partner in the adjacent room. Soul’s wavelength is slow and steady, either asleep or about to be. Maka frowns. Of course he can sleep comfortably in this environment. He’s always preferred the apartment a bit colder than her, gently teasing that not everybody is as stick-thin and heat-dependent as her as he turns the temperature down a degree or two. She thinks that he even sleeps with the window open some nights- for the distant city noise or the dry, cold desert breeze she’s not sure. 

It’s this line of thinking that turns her mind to how nice it would be to bask in some of that natural body heat he always seems to have in excess. Maka thinks about the few times she’s teased him by sliding her icy-cold hands up his sleeve or into his shirt collar and how it always, without fail, makes him jump and shrilly grouse at her- ‘ _ worst partner ever’, ‘leeching my body heat’, ‘standing award winner of coldest hands this side of Antarctica’.  _

Desire for thermodynamic stability and absolutely nothing else is what makes Maka wriggle from her bed, still wrapped in blankets with the faintest line of a malicious grin teasing at the corners of her mouth. 

Even the scant carpet of her bedroom floor feels cold beneath her stockinged feet. She blows out a breath and shrugs her blankets tighter around her frame, exiting her room and shuffling the few steps down the hall to Soul’s door. With her grin now threatening the border of maniacal, she turns the knob and slips quietly into his room.

As expected, her weapon is asleep, sprawled comfortably across his entire double bed. Maka sees a messy shock of white hair rumpled against where his pillow should go, and a single socked foot poking out under his blankets, but nothing else of Soul is visible. Aside from the sleep-rhythmic rising and falling of his blanket-covered silhouette, Maka could believe that this was just an incredibly disheveled bed devoid of a gangly, warm-blooded weapon. 

Soul’s window is closed, she notices, as she approaches him. She supposes it must be too cold for that, even for him, though he doesn’t seem to mind the chill of the apartment, considering his barely-audible snoring. On the verge of being teeth-chatteringly cold, Maka is jealous. 

She cautiously slides one hand under the edge of his blankets, hoping to climb into his bed without disturbing him. She’s got a plan to enact, anyway. Her flannel pajamas rustle quietly against his sheets as she slips in beside him, shedding her blanket burrito covering in exchange for being enveloped by the warmth of Soul’s body heat accumulated underneath his thick, solid red duvet. 

She only hesitates for a second before she slides her hand blindly underneath the covers and manages to find the slight dip in the mattress that indicates she is nearing her target.

Maka almost begins to feel bad about what she’s about to do before she reaches out to lay her icy cold fingers across his peaceful, warm, sleeping back. 

Soul grunts audibly, sucking in a breath in that unique way that humans do when they’ve been suddenly woken up, and arguably in the even more specific way that sleepy, disgruntled weapons do when their meisters wake them up by pressing very,  _ very _ cold hands to their preternaturally warm skin.

“-Maka?”

Maka hums. She can feel the soft shift of the mattress as Soul lifts his head up to blink blearily at her in the dark. He sighs, a deep long sigh, and rubs a hand across his eyes.

“D’you need something?”

“It’s freezing in here,” she hisses, pressing the backs of her hands against him and revelling in the instant gratification that is her human furnace of a partner. He squirms away, just a bit, before turning over to face her. 

“You’re the worst, you know,” Soul mumbles, yawning, “Could’ve done without being felt up by an ice devil.” 

“That’s an oxymoron, you idiot. An ice devil can’t exist.”

“Yeah? Explain how you’re here then.”

His face, still relaxed with sleep, spreads into a lazy, sharp-toothed grin. Before Maka can come up with a smart retort, he begins snuggling back against his pillow with an exaggerated sigh. Her hands come back to rest on the soft fabric of his sleep shirt.

“C’mere, you heat leech.” 

Soul’s eyes are barely open now, but she can hear the gentle smile in his mumbled words. He lays one warm, dead-weight arm across her belly, and Maka doesn’t think twice before tucking the crown of her head under his chin, pulling his blankets up around her shoulders. 

It feels as natural as breathing, she realizes, to be this close to another human.  _ Her _ human, she thinks. 

Enveloped in the comfortable, familiar warmth of her partner’s body, Maka finds her breathing easily falling into rhythm with his as she drifts off to sleep. 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! short and sweet, but let me know what you think! @snowyart4 on twt, @pearlecsent on tumblr


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